Photos: Adobe Creative Suite 3

Highlights of the new features and enhancements in Adobe's Create Suite 3 core applications.

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With its Creative
Suite 3 upgrade, Adobe has increased the amount of control you have over both the appearance of Bridge as well as customization of its information display. Part of Bridge CS3's performance gains come from Adobe's progressive rendering options for thumbnails.

Not only is Bridge more attractive to look at, but it's far more informative and powerful than before. It has inherited Lightroom's quick filtering capabilities (1), as well as a generally friendlier and familiar appearance (2). If you've edited raw files, it applies the adjustments from the XMP file and informs you what those adjustments were (3). Bridge also supports custom work spaces, with three quick-access presets (4).

A new Loupe tool lets you see a 1:1 magnification within the preview window. Unlike Lightroom, where the the Loupe disappears when you move the cursor, in Bridge the Loupe remains sticky and moveable until you click on it again.

However, there are limitations to the extent of integration within CS3. For instance, many commands are located in different places within each individual application's interface. You'll find the Free Transform tool within the Modify pull-down menu of Flash.

You might have the impulse to run many CS3 programs open at once to take advantage of their integration. However, sometimes we did so much multitasking that simple tasks failed. Here, we tried, yet failed, to save a selected region of an image within Fireworks CS3. At minimum, you should have a computer with 1GB of RAM and 5GB of hard drive space on either Windows XP SP2 or Vista, or an Intel-based Mac.